Joe Hill

Landing at Ellis Island from Europe at the start of the 20th century, the Hågglund brothers anticipate opportunities galore in this new land after years of poverty and illness at home in Sweden. Unable to speak the language, they can only find manual labour work and it is this dead-end existence that spurs Joe (Thommy Berggren) to challenge his ideals of just what life in the USA was going to mean! Separated from his brother he is soon travelling the land as a drifter, travelling illicitly on the railways and that’s when he encounters the enthusiastically burgeoning IWW. At first, they look like red-scarved Boy Scouts, but put them on an old soap box and soon they are bemoaning the lives of the workers to the chagrin of the bosses but offering hope of change and protest to the put-upon labouring class who were treated like dirt. Joe has a natural talent when it comes to public speaking coupled with an ability to deliver a catchy ditty or some poetic prose and soon he is considered a real pain in the neck by the authorities. Their chance to deal with him comes when a grocer and his young son are shot, Joe is accused and despite putting up a spirited self-defence is convicted of the crime. With execution looming, things are brought into sharper focus as, despite some interventions, the inevitable looks exactly that. For much of this, it has the look of a standard 1970s western and I was expecting a Carradine to pop up at some stage, but as it starts to accelerate we are shown quite poignantly the disregard for human life that existed amongst the more industrially-minded of the pioneers and the determination of some to stick up for the little man. It’s the last half hour, though, that has an almost macabre tone to it and throughout Berggren holds this engagingly. He portrays a man stripped of his optimism as surely as it were his shirt, but who is not one to lie down and take it. His integrity rather than any political dogma proves to be his moral compass and Wilderberg allows that characterisation to build effectively. There is something almost surreal about the last five minutes, and that tops off this superior evaluation of a man who inspired many a folk song.